In a conversation with Fudzilla, a Senior Product PR Manager confirmed that NVIDIA's next-gen 28nm Kepler GPUs were on track, and samples were in house. However, there was no specific information as to a timeline of "on track".

In a conversation with Fudzilla, a Senior Product PR Manager confirmed that NVIDIA's next-gen 28nm Kepler GPUs were on track, and samples were in house. However, there was no specific information as to a timeline of "on track".

The PR Manager said, "We are on track with our Kepler roadmap. We have 28nm silicon in house now. Our transition to 28nm is going better than 40nm, and yields are better than our original plan." However, it is worth noting that Kepler wasn't specifcally mentioned as sampling – the in house samples were simply described as "28nm silicon".

While AMD's Southern Islands / Radeon HD 7000 series releases first in January, the delay to NVIDIA's competitor is likely to be shorter than the 40nm HD 5000 vs GTX 400 generation where AMD beat NVIDIA by 6 months. Fudzilla suggests that NVIDIA could have its first Kepler GPUs out some time in Q2 2012. Also, more information may be presented at CES 2012 – also the time for AMD's big release.